Slush, it's never pretty.

[andpuff]

Terrific article by Laura Miller in Salon on the future of publishing. Or, more accurately, the future of reading.

When anyone can be a published author -- How do you find something good to read in a brave new self-published world?

Comments

[haikujaguar]

What I find misleading about articles about this is the presumption that people don't already read slush: the explosion of fan fiction all over the net means that plenty of people are already combing through stuff looking for gems, and they seem to have no problems doing it (and trading recommendations around to help other fans find the good stuff).

Most of the time if you're into something, you'll take average (or even lower) quality to have what you're looking for, and bypass the excellent thing that you're not at all interested in. And a lot of people reading online have the same "if it doesn't hook me in a few paragraphs, I'm gone" instinct that editors develop.

So I'm not sure what people writing articles like this are thinking, but I wonder if they realize that avid readers, the kind you can't keep fed, are already wading through slush online. :)

[jenna_thorn]

Exactly. Her tone is frustrating to me, since face it, I do disregard quite a lot of writing, some of it net-published, some of it self-published, some of it published by teenty tiny presses (, Panther Creek Press. I promise you've never heard of it.) Yard Dog Press is an actual publishing house and guess what? I cringed at the typographical errors throughout the books that had been through a slush pile and an editor

[haikujaguar]

That's basically how I choose my reading material, with one big exception

[jenna_thorn]

I don't know that I'd ever considered cost as a factor since I tend to be a used bookstore/ library patron, so my investment is emotional, rather than financial, but I can see your point. Emotional investment is still and investment, though, and I'll admit to a certain feeling of betrayal as I struggled through books that had been suggested by people I admired.

Are you happy with your Kindle? I'm a slow adopter of new technology, but golly, it would be nice to have one book-sized item with multiple books on it for travel purposes.

[phillip2637]

Being completely superficial, I almost spurted coffee onto my computer at her description of publishing as 'hidebound'.

It *used* to be. :-)

[smoooom]

I know some one who is self published. I went to look at his books. to help Ian improve his writing skills I've having him edit bad paragraphs. I have him several from this guys books. Not only did he need editing, he needed proofing and someone to check continuity. Now I'm no grammar mavin, so you know that if I'm seeing many errors per page, there's at least that many. His Plot line, well once I steeled my self past the grammar, it was sexist, and old. The Med from the FBI had names, the Women didn't. The women talked about missing home and stuff, and added nothing useful to the plot.

I checked several of his books, there were each as bad as the next. A long with some of the other offerings. This site was Lulu. I am sure that some where out there somewhere is a good self published book, well edited, and all that stuff. But for now? I think I'll stick with chapters.

Although I'm quite certain that there is a parallel between the music industry and filk. and The Publsihing industry and a few book unpublsihed books here

[spiderorchid81]

Interesting article - she has a point. But I have to agree with the post above, people who are really interested in good books already know what it's like to look for something good. Even with the worst trash sorted out by editors, a lot of what's on the market is pretty terrible (and one wonders why the h*** it got published in the first place),so one has to find her or his own criteria of quality. It's most of the time trial and error for me but I've found that the 'first few pages / first few paragraphs' method usually works.
One thought: it may be that anyone can (e-)publish now, but will they be able to make an living out of it? Perhaps the self-publish craze will burn itself out shortly anyway when people realize that being published doesn't automatically mean that the book will sell...

[wiliqueen]

when people realize that being published doesn't automatically mean that the book will sell...

This, I think, will be the interesting test of whether things get as bad for readers as she thinks. Unless the big online outlets drastically change the way search results come up, an order-of-magnitude increase in the number of self-published offerings isn't going to change much of what readers see when shopping. There'll just be many, many more pages of results they never bother to look at, under the ones that come up first for the same reasons they do now.

We have the option of braving the free-market slush pile if we so choose, but it will be just as easy to ignore it. My hunch at this point is that it's not going to be as radical a change for anyone as some people are projecting.

[spiderorchid81]

Agreed. The market is already huge and I suppose that self-published works will be more like one drop more in the bucket than a revolution.

[haikujaguar]

I think it's an overlooked question to ask whether even normal authors can make a living at it. I don't know a lot of authors who can survive off the money they make publishing. Some do, but it's far more common to hear about authors having day jobs, or partners, and without the extra income they'd be in trouble.

The typical advance a genre author gets is not enough to live off of. :)

[sixteenbynine]

Full disclosure: Self-published author here. I don't expect to ever make a living doing it, but so far it's been a lot of fun and I've sold a couple hundred books so far.

That said ...

I don't believe self-publishing is going to completely displace conventional publishing, because the latter brings with it the force of marketing and publicity. It is extremely difficult to bring more than marginal attention to bear on your own work without those things

[sixteenbynine]

addendum: "so far" meaning "in the last two years". Which only further emphasizes my point about economy of scale.